


A List of Parts

by ryyves



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Abuse, Brief reference to overdosing, Character Study, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Gun Violence, Happy Ending, Healing, Intrusive Thoughts, THEIA (referenced), Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 07:47:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28347882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: The gun in her hands must have looked exactly like the gun in his, steady and shiny and sure. The light tearing through the room. The curtains closed, no blood. One moment her hand was in the bag and the next it was glittering like a miniature sun. Pick a moon, any moon, and say it looked like that.After he loses his brother, Juno careens through everything he has left.
Relationships: (not at the same time of course), Diamond/Juno Steel, Juno Steel & Sarah Steel, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel (referenced)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 42





	A List of Parts

**Author's Note:**

> Once again I can only write M-rated things with an enormous number of trigger warnings. I just relistened to the Monster’s Reflection but I don’t remember what happened before Juno got there. If you read this you’re a champion.
> 
> I’m trying to get myself out of a writing slump but I cried many times writing this so tell me what you think of this!

She’s in the kitchen when he comes home, passing the gun from hand to hand like the trigger means nothing. He can hear her drawl when he enters, the scrape of her heels. The apartment is empty and still, and though it has been only months, the hallway is longer than he remembers. He leaves the door open and pulls back his coat so he can access his gun. If the academy taught him anything, it was to be prepared, but to be honest, he hadn’t needed much teaching.

One of his comms earpieces fell out on the way over, in the rush-hour crush and his car stalled at every red light, him slamming the brake so hard he almost put himself through the windshield thrice.

Her voice cooing, _Don’t you want to know what I did?_ The undercurrent of anger, the vitriol in each syllable, the dark promise. Her voice sweet as lilies, the coffin closed already.

_Come home and I’ll show you._

His breath stopped in his chest. He dropped the box of files he’d been carrying for Falco. He was out the door without asking permission, without punching out or saying a word.

 _Ben,_ he is saying, his voice trembling, crying while he tells himself not to cry in front of his mother. _Where’s Benten?_

He looks at her and sees fragments small as photographs, disembodied: Her hair pulled down around her face, shivering in the wind of his anger. Her slender fingers and bitten-down nails fluttering around the handle. Her shoulder protruding from a sweater bold as blood.

The keys fall into his hand like a gift, glittering in the spotlight above her.

He is touching his brother’s face and in the kitchen his mother’s foot is still tapping, on and on. The steady drum of it in his ears, the exit wound open like a mouth in the back of his brother’s chest, the lull of his head, the lukewarm hand with nothing behind it. The click, click of a safety. Of two heels hitting the ground, one after the other.

* * *

When was the last time he’d heard Benzaiten’s voice?

At first it’s hard to remember. He is standing at the end of the hallway while the police take note of the scene. He is far enough away from the office that all he can see is the crush of uniformed bodies. His mother left long ago, escorted past him while he sat in the kitchen and pretended not to look. She didn’t put up a fight. Whatever life she’d been clinging to, it was over.

The way her eyes looked, the exhaustion, the triumph, biting her lip to bleeding.

It must have been the day before yesterday, he decides. Benten laughing for hours on the comms, late after his rehearsal. He’d been eating, so his words were punctuated by his chewing. He was saying, like he said every time they spoke, _You should come back once in a while. It’s so boring without you._

The front door presses against his shoulder and it’s Puck Falco, looking exhausted, his beard neatly trimmed, in plainclothes. Falco says, _Come on, Juno. Let’s get out of here._

Juno can’t feel his body while Falco steers him down the steps, out to the car idling so far from the curb the cars behind it keep honking. There are tingles all though his body, a gentle, disaffected buzzing. His brother’s face behind his eyelids, superimposed over every avenue Falco turns down.

Falco drives him out of Oldtown, to an all-day breakfast he knows all the way at the edge of the city. Here, under the shadow of the floating mansions over Uptown a dozen blocks away and the roaring of the Martian desert, Falco lets him sit in silence. When a waiter’s shadow falls across the table, Falco orders himself a waffle and Juno a decaf that Juno doesn’t touch.

Juno stares at his comms, where his brother’s contact info is as alive as ever. Where just two days ago, he’d heard his brother’s voice.

It was his fault for leaving. His own stupid, oblivious, useless, goddamn fault. If he hadn’t gotten out… and if Benten hadn’t insisted on staying. How many two-bedrooms had Juno looked at after he enrolled in the academy, reasoning with his brother, saying, _Come with me_? Why had he ever taken no for an answer?

 _Hey,_ Falco is saying when Juno tunes back in. His face feels so heavy, his eyes, and his brother is still lying there or carried out on a gurney or in a box and it doesn’t matter because god, nothing matters anymore, not his job, not his city, not his empty apartment and a name that now belongs to no one. But Falco keeps looking at him, so he shakes his head.

Falco says, _Juno._ But his mother gave him that name, and that means it will always be a tainted thing.

 _I can still do my job,_ says Juno, his voice so gruff and weary he doesn’t recognize it. He has his hands pressed to his eyes and he doesn’t know how he got there. His sleeves are soaked with tears.

Falco’s hand touches Juno’s arm, and Juno startles. It’s a broad hand, tentative and soft, but on Juno’s skin it doesn’t feel real.

 _You’ve got all of us,_ Falco tells him.

 _Sure,_ says Juno without looking up, because that’s what you say. _Means a lot._

_We’re not gonna let you fall._

* * *

But he was already falling.

He was driving over and his mother was digging in her purse and pulling out her pills and if she’d known what was good for her, she would have been taking them.

* * *

And in the dark place that came after, Juno would have swallowed any fire to keep a light on anywhere.

In that dark place, the woman he hung the stars for is saying, over and over, even when she isn’t in the room, _I’ll be home by midnight._

_I’ll be home by two._

_I’ll be home before you know it, baby, I love you._

Juno Steel goes to the shooting range every day and gives the targets a face. He gives them two faces, then three—his lover’s, his mother’s—and then all he knows is the rapid-fire click of the trigger and the acrid stink of laser cartridges.

He drinks at home, yes, and he drinks when he isn’t at home, and he drinks when the woman comes home with tequila on her breath. He pours her scotch and drinks his own like communion. He drinks like he is saying, _Come home, come home._

What is a home but a hollowed-out space? An apartment emptied of all the effects of love? Its windows burnt out, its rotten beams leaning, the hands that hold him on this side of the lock slender with painted nails that scrape across his jaw when he wants to be gentle. He wanted to build a home here, wanted to share keys with someone who would cherish them, wanted a gentle, grey-eyed smile every morning and kisses soft as moth wings on his cheeks.

He wanted, and nothing good has ever come from wanting. He wanted a life for himself, a kitchen to call his own without the shards of old plates swept into the corners, and then he had to go to the funeral alone. He wanted to see his brother go big, wanted some proof that the Steel kids were worth more than the creds used to conceive them, and then he had to tell the whole dance troupe, one by one.

But he’s a person who does good things, and that means no matter how frightening the weight of the blaster in his hands when he gets home, he knows where the line lies. He knows he would never slip up.

He tells himself this the first time Falco asks him to draw his gun on a job. He double checks its setting, and shoots, and still it should have been him.

So of course he deserves the late, lonely nights. He deserves the tears on the shower tile, the shaking hands at breakfast, the teeth fierce across his body like it’s the only part of him still worth looking at. The twin guns in their holsters in his coat and hers. Watching him when he takes his skirt off. Watching where her hands go.

The hands that pull the trigger touching each other instead. If he were a different lady, he would call it moving forward.

It should have been him.

* * *

He tries on two dozen wedding dresses in front of his fiancée, her glancing up from her comms every time he opens the fitting room door and beaming, that sharp blush high on her cheeks hard to miss. He’s pretty sure it’s bad luck, but he’s ready to give luck a run for its money.

The shop feels like a place he shouldn’t enter, too white and pristine and smelling of roses and honey, the shop assistants so quick to take his measurements and chat about the wedding’s themes. His fiancée sits against a display and watches, her chin in her delicate hand, her eyes so wistful.

He should have seen it then. But he thought deserved this—a happy life.

For this gown, with the plunging collar, she rises and runs her fingers down his shivering chest. For this one with the lace down his arms, she makes him spin. For the one that bunches at the waist, she runs her fingers through the fabric, holding it like raw dough.

He agonizes over the choices for weeks. He has never been to a wedding and doesn’t know how it’s supposed to go. The heart heavy in his chest, the nervous squeeze every time she brushes aside his plans. The nights he goes to sleep cold. He gives himself to her, and he is the promise. He is the fire in her hearth.

He goes back on his own and slips into the gown with the plunging collar, lace over his chest and the A/C in the fitting room raising goosebumps across his bare skin. The private promise of it gratifies him—standing in this room, pulling up the zipper on his own, spinning before a mirror only he can see. He stands on the pedestal while people circle him with measuring tape, and explains exactly how he wants it to cling to his waist, how he wants it to fall like a cloud across the aisle. His breath stops in his throat, imagining it. The slow waltz in, the kiss showstopping, or heartstopping, the promise of her hands, always and forever.

It will be perfect, he knows, because it has to be. Because it can’t be anything but. After everything, he deserves this.

In dull hours on the job, before Falco or Rita or any of his other babysitters notice, he rehearses his vows.

* * *

And how many months afterward does his imagination carry on that way? How many white-clad corridors does he run through in his dreams, flowers hung from every ceiling, petals caught between his teeth? How many times does he choke on his own name?

Still Steel.

Always and forever, Steel.

* * *

In the dream where he is running down a dark corridor, the monster’s hot, serrated breath shudders against the back of his neck. Every door is another door his brother is behind, and every one is locked. He could pick the lock if he had a minute, could shoot it clean through with a laser, but the thing behind him is gaining. He throws himself against one after another, so by the end of the dream his shoulders are bruised and aching.

In the dream, desperation smells as sweet as melted chocolate and Benten is still dead. Juno knows this like he knows he has legs, without having to look down, and in the dream he is trying to find the one door where Benten is still smiling, because he deserved one last time. Juno is crying and the doors are still locked and the codes switch with every step. And the monster behind him is cocking a gun. Is sliding it off _stun._ He makes the switch himself, half a dozen times a day when he’s on a job and a hundred times at the shooting range, without having to look.

 _Benten,_ he is calling into the unforgiving dark. _Benzaiten, I need you._ He is crying, and that makes it hard to run.

Behind him, the monster drawls, _I’ll tell you a thing about need._ Its voice echoes down the corridor.

He doesn’t know what will happen if he reaches the end; all he knows is the pneumonic dread that fills his lungs.

He has this dream often, and each time, the doors are different. Sometimes he is throwing himself against his own front door from a street his brother never set foot down, and sometimes he is scratching the wood of his childhood bedroom. Sometimes he is lost in the corridors of the precinct building, where every door has a plaque, and on every plaque shines the same name. The change registers, in the dream, like a light registers when it has just turned on—just for a second, forgotten as the eye adjusts.

And when he wakes, there is no sweat, no covers tangled around his feet, none of the markers of a nightmare. He is cold and his head hurts. He takes two painkillers dry.

In the shower, he drinks down the water. _I’ll tell you a thing or two._

He has not taken a single sick day since he got the job and he doesn’t call in today. He pulls on yesterday’s trousers and the day before’s socks and starts the car. He has places to be, and by the time he hits the first stoplight, he doesn’t remember the dream at all.

* * *

Her hands, her ugly, beautiful hands, messing up his brother’s hair.

The click, click of her comms through the office door. The click from _stun_ to _kill._

Juno talking back like his life depended on it, and Benten talking back because he didn’t know. He’d had enough, and good for him.

The gun in her hands must have looked exactly like the gun in his, steady and shiny and sure. The light tearing through the room. The curtains closed, no blood, just a burn through one side of his brother’s face. One moment her hand was in the bag and the next it was glittering like a miniature sun. Pick a moon, any moon, and say it looked like that.

* * *

_USER.JUNOSTEEL,_ said the thing working its way into his brain. It erased his name in front of him.

Every past he had ever clung to slid off him the way rain slides off a gun, leaving in its place perfect, unblemished happiness. A future worth waking up for.

Then it reached deeper.

* * *

And when it was gone, after he’d made the call to Jet and while he was packing his to-go bag, he took the time to center himself. He held ice in his mouth until it melted, walked around chewing it. He let himself float through his memories collecting the ones worth holding on to. He opened every window in his apartment and sorted through his t-shirts and let his city, bit by bit, go.

* * *

He may have been a monster once.

No. He was, and that’s a fact he can’t shake. But he was also a kid, and a dreamer, and a brother and a son, a heartbreaker and a lover and a good guy, a bad guy, an idiot, a fool, a menace, a little terror, but also a healer, a fighter, so determined and full of heart it almost killed him. His heart doesn’t feel like a cruel thing in his chest anymore, a clock ticking down like a promise of destruction rather than what it is, which is a promise of light.

And just because he can admit he was a monster, as dispassionately as possible, doesn’t mean that’s _what he was._ Doesn’t mean that’s what he always will be.

 _I believe in you,_ he wants to tell the boy he was, the boy torn between being the monster and acting like it.

_I know it hurts. I know why, and where, and how, and I’m sorry, and you’ll get through this. You’ll get through every goddamn thing this world or any world throws at you._

_And you’ll smile. Look at me, right now, smiling. You’ll walk out of it and you won’t have forgotten how. I promise you this. I’ve been in every dark room you’re still wandering through, but look at this light. Look at all this light._

_You are alive,_ he would tell his past self, so he tells himself now. _That’s the greatest gift you could ever have been given, and my god, you’re using it._

* * *

The back of his neck scars slowly where the THEIA pulled its long claws out of him. Sometimes his fingers go numb while he’s eating, while he’s shooting wildly down in the closet-turned-shooting-range, Buddy’s breath on his neck while he focused. Some sort of spine injury, he thinks, and wonders how long it will last. Mostly he keeps his hands off it to let it heal. At first he tried not to think about it, but pushing things aside has never done him any good.

Sometimes he lets Rita bandage it, because sometimes he can’t bear to touch it. He goes through gauze like Vespa goes through knives, like Buddy goes through laser carts. He finds a handheld mirror left in the bathroom, probably Nureyev’s, and spends a long time studying the wound. For so much trouble, it’s so small, barely the size of his pinkie nail. It’s ugly, red and raised. Half his city bears something like this, but that doesn’t make it easier.

It has no power over him, he tells himself, but its voice still sings quietly in his head all his deepest fears.

Well. Nobody ever told him healing would be easy.

And he has something he’s never had before: a family. A place to belong without fighting for it, without clawing his fingernails bloody and his throat hoarse and his cheeks raw.

It is hard, at first, but for the first time he thinks he deserves it. Not vindictively, not as compensation for something else, but truly and honestly.

He showers under cold water and still the wound stings. He is learning to be gentle with himself, to pat the area dry, to rub lotion around its edges and pull his hair up until it dries. He is learning to let the hurt wash through him, to name it and let it go. He can’t see his spine in the bathroom mirror, and he is glad for that—he stares enough at his eye without the eyepatch, a stunning, ornate thing Nureyev got for him during their last fuel stop. Nureyev disappeared into the crowd, just the sway of his hips and the dark fall of his hair to mark his departure. When Nureyev handed the patch to him, Juno held it like a jewel. But Nureyev said, _Are you going to put it on or must I?_ with that glint in his eye that Juno is learning to decipher as happiness.

He wears it every day, even when he doesn’t have to. He lets his guard down in increments—he walks through the _Carte Blanche_ barefoot and talks while he’s eating and leaves his blaster buried in the pile of clothes on his wardrobe.

In bed, or at the kitchen table while Vespa pulls a face, Nureyev runs his fingers around the edges of the wound. He never adds too much pressure. It tickles; it sends pressure through Juno’s body, but he doesn’t say a word about the fear that brings with it. He is learning when to keep quiet and when to speak, when to say where the hurt lies and when to let it pass. He reaches for every morning’s light and holds on.

 _What was it like in there?_ Nureyev is thinking when his nails linger on the scar. He is sure Nureyev is thinking it, but Juno has been trying to assume less and listen more.

 _If you have questions, you can ask me,_ he tells Nureyev one evening. Nureyev’s hands have been moving across his hairline, brushing the scar, teasing all the new scars Juno has picked up since their first night together. Learning them.

 _And I will, in time,_ Nureyev says, his voice gentle and steady.

He remembers an aisle strung with flowers. A diamond he wore on the wrong finger for the longest time. The old him wants to say he doesn’t deserve it. That part of him is still there, and he lets it wash through him before turning it down.

No one here, other than Rita, knows the first thing about his past, and he beginning to think it is time to remedy that. Not with bitter laughter, the way he shared memories with Mercury; not over a stiff drink; not hazy with hurt, begging for anyone to say, _Yeah, that was messed up,_ so he could put the burden of proof on someone else for a moment. But simple and open, without reservation, because for the first time, he wants family to mean something more than blood and pain and desperation. Love has always grown like flowers in the cracks between concrete, and he is ready, he thinks, to start a garden.


End file.
